Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders waves to his supporters as he goes on stage to speak during his “A Future to Believe in San Bernardino” rally at the National Orange Show Event Center in San Bernardino, CA on Tuesday, May 24, 2016. Both Sanders and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton also held campaign rallies in Riverside.

Democratic candidate for 6th congressional district Jon Ossoff concedes to Republican Karen Handel at his election night party in Atlanta, Tuesday, June 20, 2017.

Joey Aszterbaum wants Democrats to win. That’s why he wants them to fight each other.

“The greatest thing that could happen to the Democratic Party is an all-out brawl over what we stand for,” said Aszterbaum, a state party delegate from Hemet who was a Bernie Sanders delegate at last year’s Democratic National Convention.

After Barack Obama was elected in 2008, “the Republican Party didn’t call for unity, unity, unity,” Aszterbaum added. “Instead, there was a massive fight for the heart of the party” that paved the way for the GOP to dominate Capitol Hill and most state houses.

As California Democrats seek to retain and expand their power in 2018, an intraparty power struggle, evident in the election of a new state party leader, continues between Sanders-style progressives and so-called “establishment” Democrats.

It mirrors tensions at the national level where calls for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to step aside followed a disappointing loss in a special congressional election in Georgia.

“Civil wars are the nastiest kind of conflict,” said Jack Pitney, a professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College.

“The Democratic Party’s infighting could hamper its efforts to retake the House in 2018. The party’s candidates could end up wasting precious resources attacking one another instead of reserving them for the fall campaign.”

While Democrats have hemorrhaged elected offices nationwide, they’re firmly in control in California, where more than four in 10 voters are Democrats and GOP voter registration is in decline. The party holds all statewide elected posts, a two-thirds majority in the Assembly and state Senate and 39 of California’s 53 congressional seats.

A lengthy to-do list awaits Democrats next year. The road to retaking the House goes through California, where Democrats want to flip at least six GOP congressional seats, including four in Orange County where voters went for Hillary Clinton in November.

The party also wants to keep its Sacramento supermajority and the governor’s seat. The fight for the Legislature started early with a GOP push to recall newly elected state Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton, for supporting a gas tax hike. Sacramento Democrats this month pushed through changes to election laws that could help Newman survive.

Democrats hoped an anti-Donald Trump backlash would help win special elections for open congressional seats in Kansas, Montana, Georgia and South Carolina.

But while Democrats did better than normal in those strong GOP districts, Democrat Jon Ossoff’s June 20 loss in a Georgia district seen as winnable prompted questions by some House Democrats about Pelosi’s leadership.

‘This dying wave’

Last summer, the Sanders-vs.-Clinton fight came to California, with the two candidates crisscrossing the state as Sanders made a last-ditch stand for the Democratic presidential nomination and came up short.

Talk of unity rings hollow to Aszterbaum, an Ellis supporter who went to the state convention and doesn’t recognize Bauman as chairman.

“You cannot create unity by asking for it,” he said. “You can only create it by exciting people about common issues, and frankly, it’s not happening.”

The party remains beholden to big money, corporate interests and is alienating working-class and independent voters, Aszterbaum said, adding that Ossoff lost by running as a centrist.

“It’s no longer just left and right. It’s the small amount who have versus the very many who don’t,” he said. “You have Democrats hanging onto this dying wave, this centrist wave.”

It’s not enough to just run against Trump, Aszterbaum said. He argues that Democrats should look to Great Britain, where the Labour Party ran on a populist, progressive platform and took the conservatives from a governing majority to a hung parliament in the June 8 election.

Pitney cautioned the Democrats against turning left in every race.

“Ossoff did not even live in the district, and people noticed,” Pitney said. “He came across as a twerp who was mainlining San Francisco money. In 2018, Democrats need to look back on how they retook the House in 2006, when they were willing to recruit moderate-to-conservative candidates for conservative districts.”

‘Will it matter?’

Party leaders in Orange and San Bernardino counties aren’t worried about infighting derailing their 2018 hopes.

“The question is, how much will it matter?” said Fran Sdao, chairwoman of the Democratic Party of Orange County.

“What’s happening on the ground in Orange County with the congressional races, we are very focused,” she said. “We are very fortunate to have as many candidates as we have in each of these four races. … Our voter engagement is going gangbusters.”

San Bernardino County Democratic Party Chairman Chris Robles doesn’t think most voters care about the party leadership feud.

“People vote for what their interest is within their communities,” said Robles. “This fight at the upper level of the party is just not something that they’re interested in. I don’t think most voters understand it anyway.”

Voter turnout, not intraparty conflict, is more likely to affect 2018 outcomes, said Marcia Godwin, a professor of public administration at the University of La Verne. There could be more races, she said, like last year’s contest in California’s 47th Assembly District, where a progressive-backed Democrat (Eloise Reyes) beat a more moderate Democratic incumbent (Cheryl Brown).

Historically, the party out of the White House tends to fare better in midterm elections, noted Renee Van Vechten, a political science professor at the University of Redlands.

“Unity would buttress the Democrats’ margins, as would getting ‘on message,’ ” she said. “But intraparty squabbling is not likely to change the ultimate outcome, which is that Democrats will pick up seats and likely take back the House. But nothing is certain, especially in these times of political disruption!”

With California Republicans set to use the gas tax hike against Democrats next year, “Democrats must be aware of the temptations of total power,” Pitney said.

“Raising taxes and rewriting election laws in the middle of a campaign (to help Newman) are exactly the kinds of things that happen when a party gets arrogant. The state GOP is in a near-death coma, but Democrats could end up jolting their opponents back to life.”

Jeff Horseman got into journalism because he liked to write and stunk at math. He grew up in Vermont and he honed his interviewing skills as a supermarket cashier by asking Bernie Sanders “Paper or plastic?” After graduating from Syracuse University in 1999, Jeff began his journalistic odyssey at The Watertown Daily Times in upstate New York, where he impressed then-U.S. Senate candidate Hillary Clinton so much she called him “John” at the end of an interview. From there, he went to Annapolis, Maryland, where he covered city, county and state government at The Capital newspaper before love and the quest for snowless winters took him in 2007 to Southern California, where he started out covering Temecula for The Press-Enterprise. Today, Jeff writes about Riverside County government and regional politics. Along the way, Jeff has covered wildfires, a tropical storm, 9/11 and the Dec. 2 terror attack in San Bernardino. If you have a question or story idea about politics or the inner workings of government, please let Jeff know. He’ll do his best to answer, even if it involves a little math.

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